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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 9254750" data-attributes="member: 2067">IDK, I think we're dealing with some pretty fuzzy terms, and the thing is more of a spectrum than a binary. Even your most tightly planned campaign will have, if it is well designed, considerations for what happens if things go off the rails. Also, the plan for a homebrew game might not exist as anything more than "a general arc" + "specific plans for the next session or two." We don't plan the end of each scene or the exact words of each NPC, we shoot from the hip - the story still emerges through play.On the other side, even an open sandbox will have hooks and elements that are more linear. Okay, go anywhere you want, but there's a lich over here and dragon over there, and once you decide to go for one of them, they have a dungeon and a boss fight, and both will still continue their nefarious activities until your group ends them ("The mind flayer died offscreen of a bad flu" isn't a satisfying end!). I think D&D's design favors emergent stories, but only slightly, and imperfectly at that. Like, I think of the escalation die from 13th age as a very "story" mechanic - it wants a satisfying narrative of increasing danger. D&D doesn't have anything like that (and modern D&D has tighter fights anyway). D&D also possesses 13 different core classes, which points to something more emergent - you don't know what kind of party you're going to have before everyone generates their characters, and the characters aren't defined by wants and needs and connections, they're defined mostly by tools and attacks. This doesn't mean that D&D doesn't work for story-focused games, because it can work very well, it's just not really what you're set up to do with the mechanics the game gives you. There's a bit of a tension between the more deterministic nature of a heavily story-focused game and the more open-ended nature of something that favors a more emergent style that means that different players and different groups (and even different campaigns!) will prefer different places on the spectrum. I like emergent games, because part of what I want out of my play is surprise, and it's easier to get that from emergent-style mechanics (maybe the end of your story is this random ogre critting your ass) than it is from story-style mechanics (your story will end on your terms, where you become the hero you were always meant to be!). You can get surprise in the story, too (does event A happen or does event B happen?), but it's smaller-scale stuff. I just finished running a group through all the episodes of Radiant Citadel, and it was absolutely a "campaign." Characters stayed consistent, and it became a sort of travelogue vibe of these adventurers exploring all these different lands. It had a beginning, middle, and end. It wasn't much of a constructed story (no villain, no arcs, no character conflicts), but maybe something more like an anthology of Sherlock Holmes mysteries. But it was a hell of a lot of fun, anyway.I don't think we should only strive for emergent stories. I do think that if you want to run a very compelling narrative, you might not get what you want out of D&D, which is set up more for emergent stories. But if you're making a homebrew game, you should lean into what compels you and your group. My recent Theros game was VERY story-driven, very character-driven. And it was a blast. My Radiant Citadel game was more emergent. And it was a blast. Neither one is superior, at the end of the day.</blockquote>

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